“Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery,” Sally Cline, 272 pages, Arcade Publishing, 2016 (Review by Bill

Hughes)
His family roots ran deep in the “Old Line State.” Dashiell Hammett, aka Samuel “Dash” Dashiell
Hammett, was born on a tobacco farm in 1894, in Saint Mary’s County, Maryland. Before Hammett
died in 1961, in New York City, at age 66, he had become one of America’s most famous
detective/mystery novelists.

When Hammett was seven years old, his family moved to 212 North Stricker Street, in Southwest
Baltimore. He even attended Poly H.S. for one semester. Only “six blocks away” from him on Hollins
Street resided the “Bard of Baltimore,” the incomparable, H.L. Mencken. Their literary paths would
soon cross as Hammett began to find his life’s calling.

Hammett’s mom, Annie Bond, was a nurse, but “sickly.” His “bad-tempered father,” Richard, was a
loser. He couldn’t hold a job and was also a “drinker and a womanizer.” His father was related to the
prominent Briscoe Clan of Southern Maryland. Father and son were “not friends,” wrote author Sally
Cline.

Whose off-the-wall conduct to you think Hammett would emulate as he

matured into adulthood? Try – his father’s.

In “Dashiell Hammett: Man of Mystery,” Cline brilliantly captures the

life and times of this often private, enigmatic and talented man. By all
accounts, he took pulp fiction yarns — about hard-boiled private eyes,
such as his popular creation, Sam Spade, in “The Maltese Falcon” — to
new, and higher, literary heights. Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan
Doyle would be proud.

When I was growing up in the post-WWII era, I vividly recall enjoying

the Spade character in the movie version of “The Maltese Falcon.” He was portrayed by the splendid
actor, Humphrey Bogart. The film is a classic in that genre. The book went on to become the “best
known American crime novel of all time.” Also in the film were some of the iconic actors of that
black/white film era: Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Ward Bond.

“The Maltese Falcon,” according to Cline, included some of Hammett’s darker, philosophical views
on life. She wrote: “Its primary theme is how appearance belies reality, nothing is ever as it seems,
how order and meaning are mere human fabrications, and blind chance is the only thing on which we
can count.”

The 1941 movie, directed by the legendary John Huston, helped to make the book “a massive best
seller.” Whether or not Hammett appreciated the fact that his “most famous and meaningful
passage” about life, was left out of the film, isn’t known.
Getting back to Hammett’s formative years. Like his dad, he had a hard time holding onto a job until
age 21. Then, in 1915, he went to work for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Baltimore. One of his
assignments was in Butte, Montana, to spy on the Wobblies, a radical union group. That chore
turned his stomach. He left the agency in 1918, to join the U.S. Army at Fort Meade, MD.

Hammett served stateside, during WWI, and rose to the rank of sergeant. In the process, however, he
caught the “Spanish Flu,” which led to tuberculosis. While recuperating out in Tacoma, WA, he met
his future wife, an attractive VA nurse, Josephine “Josie” Dolan. In July of 1921, they were married.
Before long, they added two lovely daughters, Mary Jane and Josephine, to their household. To say
that their relationship was complicated, is an understatement.

While living in San Francisco, CA, in 1922, with his family, Hammett’s literary career began to
flourish. Mencken published his story, “The Parthian Shot,” in his magazine “The Smart Set.” Four
more short fiction pieces soon followed.

When, in 1923, Mencken took over the “Black Mask” magazine that featured pulp fiction, it published
Hammett’s first pulp fiction novel, “Arson Plus.” The rest, as they say, is history. “Five
groundbreaking novels, one novella, and more than sixty short stories” were his lifetime output,
Cline tells us. Hammett concluded his fiction output with “The Thin Man,” in 1934. Then, “writer’s
block for twenty-seven years” intervened!

In 1931, in Hollywood, Lillian “Lilly” Hellman entered his life. She was then 25 years old, short,
plain-looking, high energy, Jewish, with red-hair, and a wannabe playwright. Hammett was then a 6
ft.-plus, suave, 36 years old, a successful novelist and a lapsed Catholic. They were both married.
They also both loved sex, booze, life in the fast lane and literature. The connection was made. Their
often rocky relationship was to last for 30 more years until Hammett’s death.

When WWII started, Hammett, age 48, joined the U.S. Army in September, 1942, despite his serious
medical problems. He spent two of the next three years assigned to the Aleutian Islands and loved
every minute of it. He again made the rank of sergeant.

During Hammett’s Hollywood days in the 1930s, he had been busy doing screenwriting. As “The
Great Depression” sunk in, he was also a political “Lefty.” Many of the unions and groups, including
the Communist Party that Hammett joined, supported the revolution in the Soviet Union and
opposed the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. During WWII, the Soviet Union was America’s ally.
Soon after it ended, however, the “Cold War” began, along with the rise of McCarthyism. Red-baiting
then became fashionable on Capitol Hill.

Cutting to the chase, Hammett was targeted by the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and right-wind politicos in
Washington, D.C. He once told Hellman: “I don’t let cops or judges tell me what democracy is.”
His anti-fascist beliefs, and refusal to “name names,” led in 1951, to a six-month’s confinement in a
federal slammer for “criminal contempt of court.”

By then, Hammett was a broken man — physically and financially — and also blacklisted in the film
industry. He owed hundred of thousands in back taxes. Despite making over one million dollars from
his books and screenplay work, he died living off his VA disability pension and the charity of
Hellman.

In death, however, Hammett, a veteran of both WWI and WWII, scored a telling blow against the
Right Wing creeps that had so viciously hounded him in life. He is buried in sacred ground among
America’s most honored dead: Arlington National Cemetery!

I’m giving Sally Cline five out of five stars for her first-rate, well-researched and compelling
biography on Dashiell Hammett. It is a gem of a book, very entertaining, and it belongs in the library
of all lovers of American literature.

One of the masters of crime fiction and a former operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) first
introduced his iconic private eye, Sam Spade, in 1930 in his famous novel The Maltese Falcon. He followed that novel with The Thin Man in
1932 which introduced the incomparable and charming sleuths Nick and Nora Charles. He was also the author of Red Harvest, The Dain Curse,
and The Glass Key, as well the Collected Case Files of the Continental Op, most of which were published in Black Mask magazine.

Dashiell Hammett
 kevinburtonsmith  Authors, My Back Pages  August 3, 2018

Pseudonyms include Peter Collinson, Daghull Hammett, Samuel Dashiell, Mary

Jane Hammett
(1894-1961)
“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons.”
— Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, on May 27th, 1894, and died
January 10, 1961, in New York, New York.
In between, he was one of the seminal creators in crime fiction; a distinctive and influential
stylist. As if creating the archetypical private eye Sam Spade in The Maltese
Falcon wasn’t enough, he was also responsible for The Continental Op and The Thin
Man, the novel that introduced husband and wife sleuths Nick and Nora Charles to the
world, and became the basis for a string of incredibly popular movies. His name appeared
in the credits to The Fat Man, and other radio shows featuring his characters, and
alongside Alex Raymond’s on the private eye/spy daily comic strip Secret Agent X-9.
He grew up, a working class kid, on the streets of Philadelphia and Baltimore. He became a
detective at the ripe old age of nineteen when he joined the Baltimore branch of the
Pinkerton National Detective Agency, housed in the Continental Building. His family
needed the money.
So Hammett not only talked the talk but he  walked the walk — he actually was a private
detective. He learned the racket from an older man, a short, squat, tough-talking fellow
operative whom Hammett came to idolize and mythologize as “Jimmy Wright” (and who
would later supposedly serve as the inspiration for The Continental Op).
Certainly, detecting was no easy racket. Years later, playwright Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s
off-and-on friend and lover, who also occasionally had an off-and-on relationship with the
truth, wrote of “the bad cuts on his legs and the indentations in his head from being scrappy
with criminals.”
Perhaps most notorious of Hellman’s claims about Hammett are that in 1917 while
dispatched to Butte, Montana as a strikebreaker during a particularly brutal miners strike,
the young detective turned down an offer of $5,000 to murder labour organizer Frank Little. Many believe that Pinkerton agents have played a significant
part in Little’s lynching and murder, and that it was this incident that hastened Hammett’s departure from Pinkerton’s, but some researchers doubt
Hammett’s actual involvement. Still, it seems likely it helped crystalize Hammett’s left-leaning views (which later got him into so much trouble with
McCarthy and his pals in the 1950’s).
Hammett left the Pinkertons in 1918, and enlisted in the Army, serving in the Motor Ambulance Corps, but tuberculosis contracted while in service
prompted his medical discharge less than a year later. It was while he was a patient at Cushman Military Hospital in Tacoma, Washington, that he met a
nurse, Josephine “Jose” Dolan, whom he married on July 7, 1921, in San Francisco. They had a daughter, Mary Jane in 1921.
Somewhere around this time, Hammett briefly rejoined the Pinkertons, working out of their San Francisco office, but he soon left, to pursue his
writing. In the March 1923 issue  of The Smart Set, there is a rather fanciful account of some of the more peculiar cases Hammett was involved in
while he was a Pinkerton Op, including his confession that he knew a man who once stole a ferris wheel.
 Shortly after the birth of their second child, Josephine, in 1926, the Hammetts were told that, due to his tuberculosis, Hammett should move out. They
rented a home in San Francisco, where Hammett could visit on weekends, until he “got better.” He never really got better, and the marriage soon fell
apart, with the child support only occasionally trickling in. His tuberculosis and alcoholism, though, stayed with him for the rest of his life.
But let me get one thing straight. It isn’t because of his backstory as a REAL! LIVE! PRIVATE EYE! that we read Hammett these days, or it shouldn’t be.
The reason people still read him today isn’t because of his biography — as fascinating as it may be. Nope, it’s because he was a great writer.
*****
By 1922, Hammett was a fledgling professional writer in San Francisco, seeing his first short story, “The Parthian Shot,” published in the October 1922
issue of The Smart Set, and shortly after, “The Road Home” in the December 1922 issue of a relatively new pulp mag, Black Mask. His third Black
Mask-published story, “Arson Plus,” in the October 1, 1923 issue, introduced his ground-breaking character, The Continental Op — the nameless
operative of the Continental Detective Agency.
Hammett may not have been the first to write about a hard-boiled private eye, but, as our pal Jim Doherty notes:
Carroll John Daly was undoubtedly first to publish a short story featuring a hard-boiled sleuth who defines his profession as a private detective (“Three-
Gun Terry“ in the May 15, 1923 issue of Black Mask), beating the first Op story, “Arson Plus” into print by a few months… But there’s no reason to
suppose that Hammett would never have created the Op had not Daly created Mack . In fact, it’s possible the two stories were being written
simultaneously. Daly, being a less careful writer, may have simply beat Hammett to the mailbox.
On the other hand, there’s plenty of reason to suppose that Chandler wouldn’t have created Marlowe, Macdonald wouldn’t have created Archer, Nebel
wouldn’t have created Donahue, etc., etc., etc., had Hammett not first created the Op.
Hammett’s experience with the Pinkerton’s and his knowledge of how detectives really work, that it involved stake-outs, interrogation of suspects and
long, endless tail jobs as well as gun battles and fistfights, was something new in the pulps. It gave Black Mask the much-needed grit of credibility.
Encouraged by the pulp’s ambitious new editor, Captain Joseph Shaw, who had lured the ailing writer back into the fold after a dispute about money
(Hammett wanted more) with former editor Philip Cody, Hammett became one of the true stars of that pivotal pulp. Hammett’s Continental Op eventually
appeared in over three dozen stories, some of which formed the basis for the novels Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, both published in 1929.
Hammett’s best-known, and arguably best novel, however, was his third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), also serialized in Black Mask, which
introduced Sam Spade. It was a smash; an almost instant best seller. Hammett had made it, and he started palling around with other literary types
like Dorothy Parker and William Faulkner, and started hanging around trendy nightspots.
Unfortunately, Hammett’s long-struggled-for financial success also allowed him to indulge in a multitude of weaknesses–a perennial man-about-town, he
was a cad and a bon vivant, a gambler, and a womanizer, often making plays for the wives of friends, including perhaps that of his Black Mask pal, Raoul
Whitfield. But most troubling of all was his accusation by an actress friend, Elise De Viane, that Hammett had beaten and raped her in 1931 after dinner
in his Los Angeles apartment. She sued for $35,000 in damages in Superior Court, and Hammett, by now 3000 miles away in New York City, neither
denied nor could be bothered to contest the charges. Judge Joseph McCall found for the plaintiff, and only awarded De Viane $2500 in damages.
Hammett could have easily afforded it.
The Maltese Falcon was a bestseller right from the start, after all Of course, a big part of the novel’s popularity now can be traced to the classic film that
was adapted from it in 1941, directed by John Huston, and starring Humphrey Bogart as Spade, but that was years away. But Hammett’s next two novels,
The Glass Key (featuring the gangster Ned Beaumont, 1931), and The Thin Man (with Nick and Nora Charles, 1934) were also best sellers; and went on
to become successful films; and in the case of The Thin Man, a whole string of films.
By 1934, despite the money rolling in, Hammett’s career as a published writer was essentially over. The previous autumn, he had met Lillian Hellman, a
script reader with ambitions to be a playwright, and they would soon embark on a long, tumultous and often tawdry relationship, full of high drama and
cocktails, politics and art. Alas, very little of the art was Hammett’s.
He never wrote another novel, and he only squeezed out few short stories. Always looking for money, he took a whack at scripting a comic strip, Secret
Agent X-9, but his involement with that enterprise only lasted a year. He wrote a few things for radio, or at least lent his name to them. Thanks to the
success of the film versions of his work, his reputation preceded him in Hollywood, and he dashed off a handful of screen stories, more for the money
than anything.
He also became quite involved in Hellman’s work, acting as a sounding board and editor, at least, and — it’s been suggested by many — a co-writer. He
and Hellman also became quite active in politics and both eventually joined the Communist party sometime in the late thirties, an event that would prove
troublesome down the road. (Those who deny Hammett was ever actually a card-carrying member would do well to know that he once showed his party
membership card to his daughter Jo — a story confirmed via her daughter Julie Rivett, and related in Sally Cline’s 2014 biography Dashiell Hammett:
Man of Mystery. So, yes, Hammett was a member).
In 1942, swept with patriotic fever, Hammett, then forty-eight, enlisted in the American Army and was stationed in the Aleutians. Lillian and he had
always been active in leftist politics, lending their names (and donating money) to various progressive causes, but with the end of WWII, the political
pendulum had definitely swung the other way.
By the late forties, suspicions about Hammett’s politics began to spread, and Hammett and his work were more or less blacklisted. The popular The
Adventures of Sam Spade radio show, starring Howard Duff and Lurene Tuttle, was abruptly cancelled in 1950.
In 1951, Hammett was called to testify before HUAC in the trial of four communists accused of conspiring against the U.S. government. He declined to
“name names,” and went to prison for five months, despite his failing health. He was fifty-seven at the time.
Hellman herself was also eventually hauled before HUAC, and ordered to testify and to name names. Likewise defiant, she let loose with a powerful
speech condemning the entire process, and the senators backed down.
Dashiell Hammett died on January 10, 1961.
He may never never written anything of true significance after 1934 (or at least, nothing close to the magnificense of his earlier work), but the myth of the
private eye turned writer lives on. In the seventies, Joe Gores, another San Francisco private eye turned writer, wrote Hammett, a fictitious account of
 Hammett chucking the writing gig and going after a friend’s killer. It was as much a loving tribute as it was a fictionalized biography, and was probably as
true as fiction can get. It was eventually also made into a pretty interesting film.
Raymond Chandler described Hammet’s writing style in his classic essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”:
“Hammett wrote… for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not
dismay them; it was right down their street. Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse …
He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.”
Or, as Ross Macdonald put it, in a a MWA Anthology in 1952,
“We all came out from under Hammett’s black mask.”
But perhaps the last word should go to Hammett himself who once confessed to his daughter Josephine:
“I’ve been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.”
*****

UNDER OATH
 “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons.”
— Raymond Chandler, from The Simple Art of Murder
 “When I was 14 or 15 I read Hammett’s The Thin Man and it was a defining moment. It was a sad, lonely, lost book, that pretended to be cheerful and
aware and full of good fellowship, and I hadn’t known you could do that: seem to be telling this, but really telling that; three-dimensional writing, like
three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that.”
— Donald Westlake
 “In my formative years I read everything Hammett wrote…”
— Robert B. Parker
 “I think Hammett’s stories are about the best there are.”
— Ross MacDonald
 “The exuberance of language, the relish with which seediness is described . . . it’s a pleasure to imagine young Hammett cutting loose with whatever
rascally high jinks he could cook up.”
— Margaret Atwood
 “If not the greatest, Dashiell Hammett is certainly the most important American mystery writer of the twentieth century, and second in history only to
Edgar Allen Poe, who essentially invented the genre.”
— Tony Hillerman
 “As a novelist of realistic intrigue, Hammett was unsurpassed in his own or any time… We all came out from under Hammett’s black mask.”
— Ross Macdonald
 “Take your Chandler friend by the hand, put a piece of tape over his mouth, and tell him to just shut up and hear how it ought to be done. Hammett’s
style does not date, as does Chandler’s, and The Glass Key puts to shame every other hard-boiled writer.”
— Dilys Winn in Murder Ink
 “I never was interested in cross word puzzles or any kind of puzzles but I do like detective stories… I never try to guess who has done the crime and if I
did I would be sure to guess wrong but I like somebody being dead and how it moves along and Dashiell Hammett was all that and more.”
— Gertrude Stein
 “Hammett remains a role model not just as an artist but as a man. I owe him. I think we all do.”
— David Corbett
 “the dean of the… ‘hard-boiled’ school of detective fiction.”
— The New York Times

OH, THE STORIES I COULD TELL…

 The list of short stories below includes “The Glass That Laughed”, which first appeared in the November 1925 issue of True Police Stories, and then
promptly disappeared from history, somehow never making its way into any of the numerous Hammett’s bibliographies. But in September 2017, Daniel
Robinson, a novelist and  reader of this site, stumbled across that issue among a stack of old magazines he’d recently purchased at an auction. Unsure
what to do with his unlisted find, he contacted me, and I, acting as go-between, passed along news of the discovery to the Dashiell Hammett Readers
Group, hoping it would draw the attention of Julie Rivett, Hammett’s granddaughter, or Richard Layman, noted Hammett expert. It did — they made
Daniel a generous offer, and the story was published for a whole new generation of readers.
Novels
Red Harvest (1929; The Continental Op) | Buy this book | Kindle it!

The Dain Curse (1929; The Continental Op) | Buy this book | Kindle it!

The Maltese Falcon (1930; Sam Spade) | Buy this book  | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
The Glass Key (1931; Ned Beaumont) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
The Thin Man (1934; Nick and Nora Charles) | Buy this book | Kindle it!
Woman in the Dark (1988) | Buy this book
Originally serialized in 1933 in Liberty Magazine
First Writings
In 1922 he became a writer. Hammett’s first story was published in the magazine The Smart Set. Known for the authenticity
and realism of his writing, he drew on his experiences as a Pinkerton operative. He published mainly in the magazine Black
Mask of editor Joseph Thompson Shaw. In the early 1920s, Hammett revolutionized the novel with his dry, visual writing
and stories in which notions of right and wrong no longer prevail. The archetypes of the characters in the noir novel
appeared as early as 1929 in the pulp magazine Black Mask, vamp clinging to her fiancé addict, corrupt industrial magnate
and accomplice of the mafia who helped her to break strikes… The break is total with classic, chic and snobby detectives
like  Miss Marple or  Hercules Poirot.[2] He said that “All my characters were based on people I’ve known personally, or
known about.“

The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, Cover of the first edition (1930)

In his crime novels he described the American private detective as an antihero. Hammett’s realistic depiction of the
criminal milieu and the combination of criminal and detective set him apart from the classic crime writers who often make
a dualistic division of society into “good” and “evil”. In The Maltese Falcon (1930), his detective takes the name of  Sam

Spade, a hero played on screen by  Humphrey Bogart in  John Huston‘s The Maltese Falcon (1941). The novel would be
adapted three times for the cinema (1931, 1936 and 1941). However, today the 1941 movie adaption is regarded as one of
the classics of the crime film and as the best of the three adaptations. Dashiell Hammett reversed the classic role
distribution of the crime novel “Rogue” and “Detective” in The Maltese Falcon. In the course of the novel, it becomes
increasingly clear that each person primarily seeks his or her own advantage, without observing morals or laws. It is not
least this egoism that ultimately leads to the unsuccessful efforts of the characters. In contrast to many other crime
thrillers, society here is not divided into the “normal” righteous and the “abnormal” criminals. Everyone appears to be
(potentially) corrupt.

Lillian Hellman and the Second World War

In 1920 Dashiell Hammett married Josephine Annas Dolan to whom he later dedicated the novel (“For Jose”) to her.
However, Dashiell Hammett’s great love was the playwright  Lillian Hellman, with whom he had a relationship since 1931.
The relationship lasted until his death. During the Second World War, Hammett volunteered and spent his military service
as editor of an army newspaper on the Aleutian Islands. After three years of service, Hammett left the army reserve in 1945
as a staff sergeant. He joined the Communist Party in 1937 and became president of the Civil Rights Congress founded in
1946.

The Thin Man

Beside his novels he wrote a number of short stories and was also involved in screenplays. After his last novel The Thin
Man (1934) he devoted himself to left political and antifascist activities. He wrote the book after he had not written a novel
for about three years due to his alcohol addiction. The story is set in New York City in December 1932, in the last days of
Prohibition. The main characters are Nick Charles and Nora, his clever young wife. Nick Charles used to be a detective, but
now takes care of his wife’s fortune. Nevertheless, he sets out on a search, always supported by his wife Nora and
accompanied by her dog Asta. This constellation results in scenes full of situation comedy, similar to Hollywood’s screwball
comedies. The novel also thrives on a multitude of eccentric and bizarre characters, who only gradually find their way to
the truth. The novel was filmed in 1934 with  William Powell as Nick Charles and  Myrna Loy as Nora.

The McCarthy Commission

In connection with this political engagement, during the McCarthy era of 1951, Hammett was sentenced to six months in
prison for contempt of court, serving five months for exercising his right to refuse testimony under the Fifth Amendment.
After Hammett was imprisoned in prison, the U.S. Department of Internal Revenue demanded a back payment of $111,000
from him and confiscated his royalties. According to Hellman’s account, this “ban” was never lifted for the remaining 10
years of his life. Hellman supported him financially. At that time, NBC discontinued Hammett’s Spade series on the radio.
The publication of A Man Named Thin was also stopped by the publisher. In 1953 he had to testify before the McCarthy
Commission. The interview was broadcast on television.

Later Years

In 1955 Hammett suffered a severe heart attack and lived a largely withdrawn life ever since. Since 1959 he received a
monthly pension of $131 from the Veterans Office. He died of lung cancer as a poor man in 1961 and is buried as a war
veteran of both world wars at the Arlington National Cemetery near Washington.

Raymond Chandler and the Invention of

the Hardboiled Detective Novel
literature  23. July 2018  0  Harald Sack
 Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

On July 23, 1888, American-British novelist and screenwriter  Raymond Chandler was born. Chandler is considered one of
the pioneers of American hardboiled novels. He invented the character of the melancholic and ultimately moral private
detective  Philip Marlowe for his crime novels. In addition to his crime novels, he wrote a series of short stories and

screenplays. Along with  Dashiell Hammett, he is one of the great authors of the black series in the American crime novel.

“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look
of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark
blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks
on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything
the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
— Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939), opening paragraph, chapter 1

Born in Chicago

Raymond Chandler was born in  Chicago, Illinois, the son of engineer Maurice Benjamin Chandler and Florence Dart

Chandler, née Thornton. Both were  Quakers. His father was from Philadelphia and his mother was from Waterford in
Ireland. His father left the family for another woman; his parents divorced in 1895 and Chandler moved to England with his
mother. From 1900 to 1905 Chandler attended Dulwich College in southwest London, where he developed his first interest
in foreign languages and classical philology. The following two years he spent in France, where he attended a business
school in Paris, and in Germany with private lessons, in preparation for the entrance examination for the British Civil
Service.

A Reporter and Freelance Journalist

In 1907, Chandler passed the examination as the third-best of a total of 600 candidates. He worked for half a year in the
British Department of the Navy and sporadically as a substitute teacher at Dulwich College after his retirement. His
encounter with  Richard Barham Middleton, who was only a little older, is said to have strongly influenced him in pursuing
a career as a writer. From 1908 Raymond Chandler worked as a reporter in London for the  Daily Express, then as a
freelance journalist for the liberal evening paper The Westminster Gazette and the weekend magazine The Academy,
where he published reports, reviews, satirical sketches and essays. A total of 27 poems were published during this period
in Chambers’ Journal, The Westminster Gazette, The Academy and The Spectator.

“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He
can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know
it such a man would not be a private detective.”
— letter, 19 April 1951, published in Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962)

World War I

In 1912 he returned to the United States. Via St. Louis (Missouri) and Omaha (Nebraska) Chandler finally  settled in
California, where he found work on an apricot plantation and in a company for sporting goods. In the following year, he
completed a three-year accounting course within six weeks. At the Los Angeles Creamery Dairy, he applied his newly
acquired knowledge as an accountant. In 1917, Chandler joined the Canadian Gordon Highlanders as a volunteer in the
Canadian army to fight with the Entente during the First World War. Chandler served in France and England ( Royal Flying

Corps) until 1919. In 1919 he returned to California with his mother. In 1924 he married Pearl Cecily Bowen, née Hurlburt,
who was 18 years older and thus entered into her third marriage. Until 1932 he held various positions, including director of
several independent oil companies.
Writing Crime Stories

Chandler lost the lucrative position at the oil company and consequently completely reoriented himself. So he decided to
dedicate himself to writing crime stories from then on. In 1933, the first short story by Chandler (“Blackmailers Don’t
Shoot“) appeared in the journal Black Mask, which had established itself as a series product for short crime stories. In the
following years more stories appeared in similar magazines. Chandler learned his trade, so to speak, in order to write
larger crime novels later on. Some of the short stories he published were later converted into novels.

The Big Sleep

The first novel,  The Big Sleep, featuring the detective Philip Marlowe, speaking in the first person, which became the model

for the film of the same name, was published in 1939 and was a great success. His second Marlowe novel,  Farewell, My

Lovely (1940), became the basis for three movie versions adapted by other screenwriters, including the 1944 film  Murder

My Sweet, which marked the screen debut of the Marlowe character, played by  Dick Powell (whose depiction of Marlowe
Chandler reportedly applauded).  In 1943 Chandler went to Hollywood as a screenwriter, where he first wrote the Oscar-
nominated screenplay for  Double Indemnity with  Billy Wilder.[1] He also wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for

the  Alan Ladd/ Veronica Lake classic  The Blue Dahlia. Chandler collaborated on the screenplay of  Alfred

Hitchcock‘s  Strangers on a Train (1951),[2] an ironic murder story based on  Patricia Highsmith‘s novel, which he thought
implausible. Chandler clashed with Hitchcock to such an extent that they stopped talking, especially after Hitchcock heard
Chandler had referred to him as “that fat bastard”.

Not Satisfied with Hollywood

However, Chandler was not satisfied with his work in Hollywood. The squinting at Chandler’s success with the public seems
to have narrowed him down too much, which is why there were more conflicts with directors and producers. Chandler has
published a number of novels, among which “ The Long Good-Bye” occupies an outstanding position. With him, Chandler
seems to have reached the climax of his concept of the mystery novel: The Mystery Writers of America honored him in
1955 with the Edgar Allan Poe Award (category Best Novel) as the best novel of the year. The last two novels, “ Playback”
and “Poodle Springs” (unfinished), no longer reach the quality of the previous works.

“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower
on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by
things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big
sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the
nastiness now.”
— Raymon Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)

Later Years

Chandler’s wife died in December 1954. Chandler threatened suicide several times in the following months. In February
1955 he tried to shoot himself in the shower, but the attempt failed. He sold his house in  La Jolla and went to London.
Chandler stayed for several months. He returned there several times in the following years and lived alternately in the USA
and England. After his wife died, Chandler started drinking. In 1956 he was hospitalized for the first time because of his
alcoholism. In the following years, he repeatedly underwent medical treatment. In 1959 Raymond Chandler fell seriously ill.
He died on 26 March 1959 in La Jolla, California.
High Regards

Critics and writers, including  W. H. Auden,  Evelyn Waugh and  Ian Fleming, greatly admired Chandler’s prose. In a radio
discussion with Chandler, Fleming said that Chandler offered “some of the finest dialogue written in any prose today“. The
high regard in which Chandler is generally held today is in contrast to the critical sniping that stung the author during his
lifetime.